The Long and the Short of it

I've just finished reading The Long and the Short of it: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren't in the Industry by John Kay. Of all the investment books I've read recently it's a star performer. why?

Like any book in this area it gives a background to investing and the process - which has been handled very well. It covers the efficient market debate quite well, and gives a very good insight into the CAPM (capital asset pricing model) and SEU (subjective expected utility). There are points where I felt it could have done with some more charts/illustration, but on the whole its an easy enough read.

The reason it's a star performer is simple: it's shows you why & how you can outperform the big trading shops, traders and analysts (specifically that they have to target short-term results). The coverage of how to put together a portfolio based on overall low risk (from having uncorrelated risky investment), rather than the classic "perceived" low-risk portfolio (from selecting correlated low risk investments) is very enlightening.

So well worth a read and deserves a place on any investors book shelf...

Getting things done with star wars bots

I'm always trying to hacks to help me remember stuff, and I've just spotted one in "Getting Things Done" (GTD) by David Allen. The process for manging work is:

• Collect
• Process
• Organise
• Review
• Do

Which happens to map to C3PO R2D2 - ignore the numbers and you get the first letters of the process - C(ollect) 3 P(rocess) O(rganise) R(eview) 2 D(o) 2

Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day an attempt to make people (women in particular) aware of female roles models in technology, bloggers are asked to write about example role models.

Having come from an engineering background there is certainly a distinct lack of female roles models full stop. It appears that the research shows that women are inspired by female role models, note that men are not as inspired by either male or female role models:

Afterwards female students who’d read an account of a female professional rated themselves more positively than the female students who read about a man, and more positively than control students who hadn’t read any account. By contrast, male students who read about a male role model did not rate themselves any more positively than male students who read about a female role model, or than control students who hadn’t read any account. 

Reading the abstract of the research causes me one concern - the phrase:

women face negative stereotypes regarding their competence in the workplace, they may derive particular benefit from the example of an outstanding woman who illustrates the possibility of overcoming gender barriers to achieve success

I'm not clear how this statement is not just opinion, I can agree with the finding that female role models inspire women, but the "why" is difficult. There are many reasons that this inspiration may occur and I distrust the easy answer proposed. For example you could using the same findings speculate that women are better at visualising their own success by seeing other women succeed. Research like this is always good to see, but I wish it was clearer what was a finding and what was speculation.

Getting Things Done with Remember The Milk (GTD w RTM)

I've been reading "Getting Things Done" (GTD) by David Allen, a book on how to organize yourself effectively in an information rich world. It's a nice lifehack to improving time management and making work/life easier by getting everything (tasks, ideas, projects) out of your head onto paper/disk.

I've also been playing with Remember the Milk (RTM) as a way of implementing GTD, it's a very simple system, but being able to tag tasks and organise them online and your phone is very useful. It really shows how poor Outlook is at basic task management.

Caching and velocity

I've been looking at "Velocity" a unified caching mechanism for .Net applications. It has some interesting uses (firstly as an ASP.Net caching provider, but also as an explicit cache).

It's very interesting from the point of creating high performance/high availability websites and applications. Below are some links and video on the project - enjoy!

  Getting Started

• SQL Server 2008 - Project codename "Velocity"
• Technical Article: Microsoft Project Code Named “Velocity”
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #39 – Use the Velocity Distributed Cache

Main links

• MSDN Velocity documentation
• Velocity Team Blog

PDC (2008) Videos

• Project "Velocity": A First Look
• Project "Velocity": Under the Hood

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Nice visualization of typefaces